Buckle's "History of
Civilization" were favorites with her also. Cowper's "Task" and
Young's "Night Thoughts," which had been her text-books at "Nine
Partners," never lost their charm for her. She could repeat pages of
them. In her last days she read "The Light of Asia" with intense
pleasure. When she had already passed her eighty-seventh year, Susan
B. Anthony visiting her, says: "She read aloud to us from that
charming poem until after eleven o'clock at night." Her conversation,
as well as her public addresses, were sprinkled with beautiful and apt
citations from her favorite authors, as it was the habit of her life
to commit to memory sentiments she most valued in poetry and prose.

It was not possible that a woman like Lucretia Mott should keep
silence in the churches, no matter what Paul might say to the
contrary, because that great brain was created to think, that noble
heart to beat through making and moulding speech, and those fine gray
eyes to see what the prophets in all times have seen. I can not
imagine her as one of the silent sisters who though having something
to say, dare not say it though to save her own soul or the souls of
those about her.

An old friend in Lancaster County, says Robert Collyer, told me
of his first hearing her in the early days when as yet she was
almost unknown. It had been a dreary time among Friends up
there, and being a man who did not care for the traditions of
"first day" and "fourth day," he was getting tired of silence.
One "first day" he went to his meeting expecting nothing as
usual, and pretty sure he would not be disappointed. Nor was he
for a time. But presently a young woman arose in the high seat he
had never seen before, whose presence touched him with strange
new expectations. She looked, he said, as one who had no great
hold on life, and began to speak in low tones, with just a touch
of hesitation as of one feeling after her thought, and there was
a tremor in her voice as if she felt the burden of the spirit.
But she soon found her way out of this, and then he said he began
to hold his breath. He had never heard such speaking in all his
life, so born of conviction, so radiant with that inward light
for which he had been waiting, that he went home feeling as he
supposed they must have felt in the olden time who thought they
had heard an angel.

I once heard such a